Self Harm
And then my quest
for interesting and original personal icons on lj took a sour turn. I did
find one personal icon image that fucked me off intensely, and it’s pretty
fucking distressing, so it’s going down the page somewhat; don’t scroll down if you don’t want to see this image, or
read my rantings:
{deep breath}
Ok, I’ve opened up some complex issues for myself here. Again.
It’s hard for me to be dispassionate about self-harm. I used to go out with someone who self-harmed – mostly cutting, with a little burning – in a way very similar to that portrayed in the images above. There was nothing I could do about it and in the end I split up with her. She swiftly took an overdose. Of course she took a bloody overdose, and this was the reason I’d avoided the question of splitting up with her for months; we went out for far longer than we should have done (18 months in the end). My conclusion ended up having to be: her self-harm was nothing to do with me. It was her decision. And hell, being with me wasn’t stopping her from doing it, was it?
She survived. She never used to do anything that was particularly life-threatening when I was with her. Since then she’s committed herself to a mental health institution (and survived that, and got back out, so fair fucking play to her) and I’m fairly sure she’s the person responsible for still occasionally sending me mildly scary stalking messages, 4 years on. (Don’t dick with me, I know people who can track pretty much any email message or lj post in the world.)
She once gave me some intense grief that I didn’t understand her pain and her need to self-harm. “Of course I don’t bloody understand it!” I shouted (apparently the shouting could be heard in a building half a mile away – no exaggeration). “Of course I can’t,” I added more quietly, “because it’s you, and your feelings, and your life. I can only sympathise, which I do, and try my best. But no, I’m never going to understand, just as I hope you’ll never be able to understand what it’s like to watch your mother die slowly and painfully of cancer.”
So I do my own little ‘my pain is more than your pain’ moments. So what? I’m human, right?
{sigh}
I found it hard for years to trust anyone who obviously self-harmed, because of the associations I had with it. I got very good at spotting the signs of someone who cut, and instinctively backed away. But I didn’t stop thinking about it all over that time and I came to this conclusion after a while: we all self-harm. In some way or another. We all punish ourselves in different ways with physical pain, exercise, sleep deprivation and different chemicals, with food in all sorts of inventive ways. And for the most part it’s a private thing, often something no-one else would be able to guess was a self-punishment, even if they were to witness directly what you were doing.
But Fay, I never punish myself arbitrarily! Shut up, you’re wrong, you do, think about it.
Nowadays, then, I have no particular problem with people who self-harm in more dramatic ways, who cut, scratch, puncture and starve themselves. It’s just a different expression of the I’m-not-worthy that we all do, right? I have no problem with people who want to talk about it, express it, make it less underground, make other people who find themselves unable to control their harming feel less alone. Why should we hide our pain away in secret holes where it can fester, unobserved, right?
Right?
Hmm. In this particular instance, wrong. This person is using these graphic and bloody (excuse me) horrible images as their personal icon [on livejournal], which is then attached to any comments they make in anyone else’s journal, for example. They’re not just being open to discussion, sharing their pain, their problems, they’re ramming this down our throats.
Look at me, look at my violence, my pain, my enormous and unavoidable and earth-shattering teenage angst. (She is under 18, I did some checking out of her journal; no, I’m not giving you the address.) God-damn, what are you going to say to a teenager who does her journal up in shades of grey writing on a black background?
Why am I getting worked up about this? I no longer know. I’ve always found that kind of behaviour incredibly selfish. Listen, I’m someone who would cheerfully maim to have a body that works perfectly, someone who has to embarrass herself on a regular basis when eating out, for example, to get people make a bloody fuss I’d rather not have. There’s places I can’t go and things I can’t do because my body won’t let me. Let’s be straight here, though, I pretty much get on with it and am always trying gently to push my body’s boundaries beyond what it thinks it can do. And I also look after it – going with the maxim that, if I’m having problems breathing, something probably needs to change about the situation in which I find myself...
I’d love to have the freedom that some people who, with nothing wrong in their lives, choose to give away in the name of getting some attention, or feeling ‘real,’ or whatever. We all want attention, for fuck’s sake. I’d far rather have attention for my talents, my interests, my amusing anecdotes, my show-off, kick-ass dancing. Instead, any jaunt out with new people leads to inevitable quizzing over my peculiar immune system. Something I’d really rather never have to talk about again, but off I go, making it a story, making it entertaining, drawing people’s laughter and sympathy.
Blah, self-centred whinging again... God knows what it’s like for people with ‘visible’ disabilities; just regularly caring for someone in a wheelchair taught me a great deal about people’s attitudes...
Heh, maybe allergies are a good analogy – the modern theory is that people with extreme allergies have not only a genetic propensity for developing intolerances to otherwise harmless substances, but such a safe, germ- and poison-free upbringing that our immune systems are forced to seek out stuff to react to, and in essence start to attack themselves. My mind can’t help but see that as symbolic for some people who self-harm...
And let me be clearer here again – I am not objecting to people who post on their own journal or communities or messageboards or whatever about what’s happening to them, what they’re feeling, how they get through each fucking day, hell each miserable minute, because sometimes drawing the next breath is hard enough, isn’t it? That’s all better than good, because stigmatising and hiding discussion of mental health and self-harm is only going to keep it being badly-understood. What I’m objecting to, I’ll make it clear again, is this selfish insistence on look-at-me-look-at-me-my-pain’s-more-than-your-pain-so-I’m-automatically-a-better-person bollocks. I lived with it time and again from other people, and you know what? No-one’s pain is any more than anyone else’s. There’s always someone worse off than you. Always. I don’t care who you are. Christopher Reeve probably thought people with cancer were worse off than him, and they think “at least I’m not living in Baghdad,” and they think “at least I’ve got most of my family left,” and so on. There is a cap on pain, and we all decide on how much of what is going on to us we count as important, as relevant, as defining how we feel, who we are. We are none of us, ever, given more than we can deal with. The greatest blasphemy is giving up.
I know you may get upset about my feelings on this, that I may get posts from my poison ex or her little coterie, calling me hairy again (grow the fuck up, it’s not too late!), that some of you may choose to disown me, thinking that I don’t understand, that I have no sympathy, that I’m just stupid and blind about cutters and people with mental health issues in general. This, to my mind, couldn’t be further from the case – what I’m objecting to here is having images thrust in front of me, forcing me to deal with something that, at the end of the day, is not my problem. I have enough problems of my own. Hell, the people I care for, my place of work, my country, the planet, have enough problems for me to care about and get involved with. Don’t force me into feeling strongly about your actions and problems, because chances are my strong feelings will involve revulsion, anger and bitterness. We all have fucking problems. We deal with them. And we choose with whom we share them, and there is an exchange of support and care and feeling between us and those people. It’s called maturity. That time when we acknowledge the two-way flow between us and the universe and damn well take responsibility for our part of it.
{deep sigh}
Thanks for reading that through (or wisely skipping past!). Comment at will. Trolls will be tolerated but not fed. You know who you are.